Friday, June 21, 2013

Protect your privacy while browsing with 3 extensions

Lately browsing comes with a price, a really big price: Ads that track you. And that means exactly what you think: an ad can track your location, your browsing history, your likes, and more. The only purpose for this is to know what do you like and know which ads to show you. This is a complete violation of privacy, and even though Firefox and Chrome have a “Do not track” option, we can never be to careful.

Adblock Plus. This is one of the most amazing extensions; it works by blocking all possible ads from any website you visit (including ads from videos). It also has a pop-up and an automatic downloads blocker. You can whitelist an specific site if you want and create custom filers.

Ghostery. This is another awesome and highly recommended extension. It focus mostly on stop trackers, scripts, and can even block cookies without any user interaction. Just as any ad blocker, you can whitelist some sites and/or some domains if you want. Just DON’T ACTIVATE GHOSTRANK and you should be good.

PrivacyFix. Unlike Adblock or Ghostery, PrivacyFix focus on taking care of the information we share and helping us to keep it private. On it’s first run, it will guide your through steps to make your social networks as private as possible, it can block Google+ and Facebook plugins, and even remove the “Like” and “+1” button from any site you browse.

There are many more options to helps us remain protected on these days, but I personally consider that these three extensions are nice for average users or people with low-spec PCs.